Keep The Aspidistra Flying

A pre-cursor to his more famous works of Animal Farm and 1984, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is Orwell’s social commentary on capitalism’s constraints. Orwell captures the struggles of an aspiring writer with almost pitch-perfect attention to psychological detail, exploring the gulf between art and life. Gordon Comstock is a poor young man who works in a grubby London bookstore and spends his evenings shivering in a rented room, trying to write.

He is determined to stay free of the “money world” of lucrative jobs, family responsibilities, and the kind of security symbolized by the homely aspidistra plant that sits in every middle-class British window.